H.I.M. Debut 'Bleed Well' Video For Fan Club

Finnish "love metallers" HIM are debuting the video for their new single, "Bleed Well", for the HIM fan club on Heartagram.com today. Imeem will feature the official "world premiere" of the video on Tuesday, November 27.

The band filmed the live footage for the new clip at their Los Angeles shows on November 14 and November 15 at the Orpheum Theatre. The footage from the shows will also be used for HIM's upcoming live DVD, to be released in 2008.

HIM frontman Ville Valo recently spoke to Straight.com about his songwriting process. "It's very hard to sing about sunshine and ice cream and birds in fast cars . . . I'm a miserable bastard when it comes to writing music," he said. "I love melancholy music, and I love the darker aspects when it comes to, like, popular music. I've always been a big fan of [BLACK] SABBATH and all that, so obviously they've been a big influence on me, and I wanted to write music that would have a similar kind of gloomy atmosphere to it."

In 2003, HIM released an album called "Love Metal", which featured a gold "heartagram" — a cross between a heart and a pentagram — on the cover. The group has trademarked that yin-yang symbol, which Valo created the day after his 20th birthday, and has taken the "love metal" concept to heart.

"When we started out, a lot of people had a hard time deciding which category we belonged to, because we had the sort of SABBATH-y thing, but at the end of the day we're singing love songs," Ville said. "It wasn't goth and it wasn't rock and it wasn't metal–it was something in between. One of the first songs we ever played was 'Wicked Game' by CHRIS ISAAK, where we put all the really fuzzy, heavy guitars on it, so I guess love metal just sounded good. And you actually have to be a proper man to be able to say that you like love metal."

HIM's new album, "Venus Doom", has sold 77,000 copies in the United States since its September release, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

HIM still has few dates left on their North American tour before they hit the European soil with the following dates: